PAX 2017: Final Fantasy XV Director Discusses What's Next

Hajime Tabata on additional DLC he’d potentially like to explore, and when the team will move on to its next project.

By Andrew Goldfarb

The Final Fantasy XV team has been busy. After a long development cycle, XV finally launched late last year and was followed by DLC episodes focusing on Gladio and Prompto, with one focused on Ignis still to come later this year, as well as a new multiplayer mode and VR experience.

With all of that in mind, we spoke to director Hajime Tabata to ask if there’s anything else he’d still like to add to FFXV, or if the team is ready to move on to something new.

“That’s a very important question,” Tabata told IGN. “Episode Ignis does mark a certain milestone in development for the game. But from then, we really want to engage with the community and find out what the content is that they absolutely have to see, they really want to see in the game. If there is that call for it, these people really do want to see a certain piece of content realized and added to the game, I very much would like to try and see if we can make that reality.”

For Tabata personally, he’d potentially like to see the stories of Ardyn and Luna fleshed out with new content, something he's also hinted at in the past.

“I think certainly considering them as incredibly key characters to the story and as personalities, characters who stick up for themselves, that’s something I’d really like to show. That also fits in very well with the results of the survey that we took where that’s what most people want to see too,” he said.

Even with that in mind, Tabata knows that the release of Episode Ignis means he’ll have to really start thinking about when it’s time to move on to the next major project.

“At the end of the year, I think we do have to have a drawing of the line and moving on to do the next project as well,” he said. “Obviously we’re doing a lot of different things within the XV development team at the moment. But every single thing that we’re doing then really is something that we have to do to get the experience to move on to do our next project. So I think we will clearly be moving in that direction at the beginning of next year.”

Tabata wouldn’t say what that project might be yet, but did point to the team’s diverse work on Final Fantasy XV as fantastic preparation for whatever the next challenge is.

“All of our work is going in the same direction. Because the more different things we do, the further we push Final Fantasy XV and take it in different directions, that expands the possibilities and the potential for our next project. It really is all going in the same direction,” he explained.

“I’m so happy that what we do to please the fans and give them what they want also comes back to aid us and make our next project all that much better. So it really does all synergize perfectly.”

Andrew is IGN’s executive editor of news and would like to play a DLC episode focusing on Moogles. You can find him rambling about Persona and cute animals on Twitter.